The Huggetts Abroad

A charming, sentimental, simple tale of a charming, sentimental, simple British suburban family who would like to escape from the post WW2 austerity programme in operation. And Dad had lost his job too. To execute this escape they decide to drive over Africa to South Africa in a 2nd hand truck with a paying Canadian guest who has a rather dark secret in his oil powered refrigerator.

Jack Warner as Dad and Kathleen Harrison as Mum were perfectly cast Cockney stereotypes, the kids and Jimmy Hanley were excellent role models too. Everyone and everything, the story, production and acting is old fashioned and mind-numbingly ordinary - I've always loved this film! 83 minutes to switch off thinking and let it flow. If you do it's amazing just how believable the plot and people really are, even when Pet Clark bursts into song. Her second song was pleasant, yet it was rudely interrupted by a nasty piece of work complaining about the row.

This was the 4th and final Huggett film, but the family were revived by BBC radio from 1953 to 1962, at its peak getting more than 10 million weekly listeners. As the other films are never shown on UK TV nowadays I presume they've been banned by the Department of Political Correctness. I'm not surprised it didn't win any prizes at the time, but it's a nice little film.

The Huggetts originally appeared in Holiday Camp.then there were 3 sequels in a mini series of which not surprisingly this was the last.The point of the Huggetts was the fact of their ordinariness.they could have been the neighbours of the cinema-goers.however when you took them out of their suburban surroundings and put them in exotic locations then the charm wears off.whats more the limits of the budget are openly on view for all to see.It is quite clear that doubles are being used on the location shots and that virtually all of the desert scenes featuring the actors are being shot in the studios.Indeed so risible are the desert scenes that you half expect John mills to appear from the horizon driving the ambulance from Ice Cold in Alex followed by a German tank.I presume that the idea of diamonds being hidden in an ice compartment was supposed to be a joke.the plot is just so silly that it is no surprise that the film series stopped here.However taken back to suburbia where they belonged then they were able to get a further 10 years on the BBC light programme just after the Billy Cotton band Show about 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.By the way it is believed that the street shots for the Huggetts home were taken in Oakhampton Avenue in Mill Hill North West London.

The decision to take the Huggetts out of their natural habitat and dump them in the African desert was misguided enough to spell disaster for the series. The usually light-hearted nature of the films is also abandoned for this tale of diamond smuggling in which Pa Huggett and his prospective son-in-law undertake an arduous trek across the desert when supplies run short. It's watchable enough, but lacks the spirit of the other movies in the series.

The title of the last gasp of the Huggett series - Gainsborough Pictures itself soon followed later the same year - lead me to expect comic frolics abroad like 'Carry On Abroad', but it turns out to be a fairly rugged adventure film, albeit constructed around the Huggett family, with actual desert footage directed by editor Alan Osbiston surprisingly effectively integrated with studio-shot scenes of the Huggetts themselves. (Did emigrants to South Africa really get there in the late forties by trekking across the Sahara?)

Esma Cannon, who was murdered in the original 'Holiday Camp', surprisingly pops up briefly in a completely different role in this film as Petula Clark's scoutmistress.

If you remember the Huggets then probably this film is for you. It follows the family attempting to escape from austerity England to South Africa, and getting caught up in some diamond smuggling along the way.

The plot is paper thin (so much so that it almost disappears at one point), and the direction moves in fits and starts, but if you're feeling nostalgic for the days when we believed in the stereotypes for foreigners because we had no experience to teach us better, then you'll like this. Interestingly enough, the only out and out baddie in the film is another Englishman - even the Canadian diamond smuggler is a lovable rogue.

The film is made palatable for me, however, by Jack Warner, who despite playing more or less the same character as his subsequent Dixon of Dock Green (and The Blue Lamp) police sergeant, exudes an irresistible avuncular warmth, and Pet Clark, whose bubbly performance helps raise the rest of the family out of the mire that an uninspired screenplay tries to put them. She also gets to sing, though you'd never believe this little girl is the same as she who sang Downtown.